Jim Knight
speaker
90 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Jim Knight’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
It was really working in restaurants and hotels and hospitality in general. And so, yeah, I do pull all three of those levers and I created, I think, my own sort of career path. But along the way, when I was working at Hard Rock, that's where I really started to get people inviting me to work So sort of do a mini orientation, if you will, a little training program and come do it for their company.
Started off in my backyard somewhere in Orlando. But then after that, you know, someone sitting in the audience, you know how it works out there. It's somebody sees you and then they invite you to come speak at their company. And then how much do you charge? And all of a sudden that's when the epiphany for me, the light bulb went off. And I thought, geez, I think I can make a career with this.
So it's funny because you do talk a lot about adversity when it comes to careers and other than the fact that I'm a pretty youthful looking guy, which is awesome now, but it was a pain growing up. And I'm a short guy. I'm a pretty short dude. So getting people to take you seriously, that's sort of the only real adversity that I had growing up for my career trajectory.
It's always been an awesome road, regardless that it was a long and winding road. It's exactly leading me to what I'm doing right now. In fact, I don't know that I'm going to do something else. What I'm doing right now is what I'm going to do the rest of my life.
That's right. And I talk about this quite a bit, either if I've got some time in a Q&A or certainly my book, I talk about these personal culture shifts. We know organizations go through stuff like this all the time. There's some type of an inflection point where right when the company, the organization starts to plateau, they got to figure out a way to sort of get that inflection point.
What's the next gate? What's the next thing? How can I get more revenue stream? How can we reinvent ourselves every seven, eight years, you know, in the marketing world, you're always told this, but I think humans go through this, I think at some point, my naturally followed a path, you know, I would, I would sort of do something for a while.
And then I'd figure out, this is either going to be something I can add to my quiver, and it's going to be a part of me, it's like Shrek says, you're right, it's layers, right? Or, I've got to completely go in a different direction. And it might be completely perpendicular to where I was going. So for me, I think it was just sort of a natural step. And again, I'm using all of this.
I'm using music education and hospitality to do what I'm doing. But it certainly wasn't, you know, I didn't grow up to say I'm going to be a keynote speaker. It just wasn't in the cards. I wanted to be a policeman or a fireman or a paramedic like my dad was. You know, I was following that pathway. And when I went to school, I went to school with a purpose.
I thought I was going to be using my degree like so many of us do. And you wind up doing something else. So you're right. I'm not sure that I had this ultimate passion at the end. What I did is I followed my passions, plural, and one led to another. And now it's the perfect, you know, for me, it's the absolute sound check. It's the perfect setup. to doing what I'm doing right now.
In fact, I don't even know what the next step would be. I think this is it for me. And I'm super happy with it.
Well, my good friend, Brant Menzoir, who, you know, he's my co-host on our podcast. He's sort of taking the same approach and his was in more in your world. He was doing a lot of sales and, you know, was a rock star. He actually can play and perform extremely well. And he was on the road for like two decades. He sort of taken the same approach.
And I, I do see other people that will try and use some of this stuff as a tool, as a crutch. They use it as sort of an element in their stuff. When it's a part of your DNA and it's just sort of authentically been a part of you, it sure makes it a whole lot easier.
I think when you're trying to parlay some information to some people, whether it's in person or like we're doing now or from a distance. I mean, now you and I are probably doing more virtual stuff than anything else. So luckily, I think that performance mindset really does come across where the word that you use that I love, that edutainment, I think is what people need today.
It can't be one or the other. I think you need both.
You know, it's tough. I think you're right. I think my first natural mindset, especially when the coronavirus started happening here in the States, let me just do what I do on stage in front of a camera at a distance. And that's not necessarily going to work because I couldn't. At that time, I could still do some of it, but I couldn't show the videos I wanted to do.
The more participatory things that I thought would be interesting. I'm not really having people write things down. I can't put my hand on their shoulder. Like all the stuff that I would have done that would have made it really interesting or more interesting. You now have to think I've got this little box frame. And so I think to your point, my energy changed. absolutely still going to be there.
I'm going to bring the thunder. I am absolutely going to be as, as much as I possibly can, but you got this little amount of space and you really can't go an hour, hour and a half keynotes. Like people are needing some 15, 20 minute bite-sized truncated pieces. So now you got to take the best of, I will say that I've gotten so much better having upped my virtual game.
You know, you get, you make sure you have the right camera and the right microphone and all that stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But again, From a pure performance standpoint to what you're talking about, I still know that the audience out there, and by the way, the majority of the audience that I'm now spending more time with are pretty middle-of-the-road industry.
So I'll give you a quick point. I thought that, honestly, when I jumped from Hard Rock in 2012, I thought that I'd be doing mostly hospitality stuff, restaurants, hotels, a little bit of retail. I am so far from that now. It is honestly banking, insurance, real estate, funeral directors are my number one clients. I do a lot of stuff with the Air Force now.
So if you think about, you know, trotting out the hair and the blue jeans and the rock and roll, it probably is some shocking off for people. It probably freaks them out. So there's a little bit of that
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